In a frank and revealing interview, screen and stage legend Dame Helen Mirren has spoken about confronting and accepting death.

Speaking with i magazine on Thursday (April 12th), Mirren, now aged 72 and with a massive career behind her but still active and working, spoke about the necessity of thinking about death as one gets older, saying that it’s not to be feared and is “as much a part of life as anything else”.

“We are all headed in that direction, sorry to tell you! It's gonna happen. So one might as well confront it, and what better time to confront it than the latter part of your life?” she said.

Dame Helen Mirren opened up about confronting and accepting death

Reflecting on the last couple of years, which have seen an unusually large number of celebrity deaths, Mirren was philosophical. “As you travel through life, you do realise that you lose friends and colleagues and death becomes a part of your life and that happens at every age. It's not just what happens to older people.”

Mirren’s last major film was the critically acclaimed The Leisure Seeker in 2017, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. It was her first film with Donald Sutherland in 27 years, and while making it, she had to overcome her long-standing dislike of filming sex scenes.

“I was a bit nervous about the sex scene. I didn’t really want to do that,” she admits. “Donald was great, in fact. He sort of took charge, if you like, of the situation.”

Explaining her dislike of them, Mirren continued: “It used to be if you did a nude scene, for example, closed set, no photography. Now they [take] a screen shot from the movie and put it on the internet, for everybody to see.”